The postures and impostures of clothing: Jean de Labadie's sartorial ambiguities

Résumé En

Jean de Labadie (1610–1674) changed ecclesiastical conditions on multiple occasions. After having been a Jesuit, he became a regular priest and approached the Jansenist Oratorians, before becoming a Protestant. He subsequently worked as the pastor of Calvinist Churches, but after a new institutional conflict, he broke definitively from the instituted Churches in order to establish the “Community of Saints” in Amsterdam. But one episode that took place in the little hermitage of La Graville in 1639–1640 caught our attention, because of a white Carmelite garment, which was tailor-made and worn during one of the most incredible episodes of his career. In order to contribute to the study of the physical materiality of religious dissent, outside or beyond the ideological structures conveyed by discourses (oral or printed), we want to take into consideration the sartorial postures and/or impostures of Jean de Labadie, using controversial works which referenced it from a biographical context.